It's Like Rapeseed

The table has some enormous red and white lilies sitting at odd angles in a blue pitcher.  The smell is identifiable across the room, above the smell of fried garlic and crackling ginger.  Three red lilies are fully extended, their arch nearly complete.  Flush to aged in a few days.  The stamens reach out erect and in only a day or two’s worth of hours, the leaves will lose their purpose and fall one by one to the table.  There are two white lilies as well but they are not facing me.  They are also temporal.  Reaching at odd angles there are two red blossoms and a solitary white bulb that have yet to explode.  Tomorrow, perhaps, as these raging leaves recede the pods will stretch out in climax, demanding attention.

Calls in the early morning.  Calls in the early evening.  Every other day that sanctity of “time at home”, “family time”, “down time” is compromised.  The anxiety of work is nearly complete.  One can walk away from the computer and leave the phone charging in the other room, but its’ difficult to do so with conviction.  It is difficult not to go run and check if so and so has gotten back to your last text.  He might be insisting on a meeting right now.  He might be.  And if he did so and couldn’t find me, why, he’d think I was flaky and wonder if I was reliable.  So I should probably go check if he’s gotten back, even though that whole loop is pathological. 

And . . . he didn’t write back.  Someone else had.  It was a positive note.  I forwarded on the affirmation to the next person.  “Will this suffice?”  Now I’ve resumed my comfy chair.  I used to sit in this chair a lot.  I don’t so much any more.  It’s a lovely rest until you stay too long and then the position of the seat begins to put pressure on your under-thighs and before long you can’t walk so well.  In this new residence of ours it has wound up in the dining room.  It rests beneath a museum print of the famous “The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba”, by Claude Lorrain (1600‒1682), which hangs in the National Gallery in London.  Usually it is my wife or my daughters or the kitten, (who is also a gal) in this chair so it has become known as The Queen of Sheba chair.  Until, of course, I sit in it.  Perhaps the Solomonic perspective, watching her ship depart, is the more apt description for this piece of furniture.  

My younger one has an interesting project.  She needs to identify crops to plant were she to be part of a group of disaster survivors, that would give her the best chance of survival.  Assuming no meat, how will you get your fat, and your carbs and your vitamins?  We had a balanced selection of base products involving potatoes and avocados and soybeans.  But then we discovered the plants had to grow in Beijing. “Sorry dear, but avocados, though rich in fat, will have to go.”  Consulting the possible alternatives I ask my wife:  “Honey, does rapeseed grow in Shandong?  How do you say flaxseed in Chinese?  You know, it’s like rapeseed.”